One of Michael Cimino’s movies, “The Deer Hunter,” won five Oscars, including best picture and best director.

Another Cimino flick, “Heaven’s Gate,” was one of the costliest flops in Hollywood history. It even was denounced from the floor of the House of Representatives.

Go figure.

“Few directors have experienced the same amount of glory and condemnation as Michael Cimino, and few have shown the same amount of talent, originality, excess and proud reluctance to compromise,” says Antonio Monda, who programmed a two-weekend Cimino retrospective at the American Museum of the Moving Image.

I may be in the minority, but I think “Heaven’s Gate” is vastly underrated entertainment – from the richly detailed opening, a Harvard graduation in 1870, through the dreamlike finale.

Another fan is French actress Isabelle Huppert, one of the movie’s stars.

“I think it’s a masterpiece,” she once told me. “I think it was political how it was rejected. It’s a great, great film and I’m proud to be associated with it.”

A music publisher’s son, Cimino was born in 1943 in New York City and grew up in Old Westbury, L.I.

He attended Michigan State, where he studied graphic arts and took part in weightlifting competition.

He moved on to Yale, where he earned a master’s after studying painting, art history and architecture.

“The Sunchaser” (1996): A troubled teen (Jon Seda) kidnaps a doctor (Woody Harrelson) and forces him to drive to a sacred Navajo site in Colorado. Cimino will be at the screening and will field questions afterward. (Oct. 21 at 3:30 p.m.)

The museum is at 35th Avenue and 36th Street in Astoria, Queens; (718) 784-0077. Tickets for “The Sunchaser” show can be ordered in advance at (718) 784-4520.